Urbanization and Productivity : Evidence from Turkish Provinces Over the Period 1980-2000
Since the early 1980s, Turkey has been going through a rapid urbanization process at a pace beyond the World average. This paper aims at assessing the impact of this rapid urbanization process on the country's sector productivity. The authors...
Main Authors: | , , |
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Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
Language: | English |
Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2007/08/8139419/urbanization-productivity-evidence-turkish-provinces-over-period-1980-2000 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/7302 |
Summary: | Since the early 1980s, Turkey has been
going through a rapid urbanization process at a pace beyond
the World average. This paper aims at assessing the impact
of this rapid urbanization process on the country's
sector productivity. The authors built a database combining
two-digit manufacturing data and some geographical,
infrastructural, and socio-economic data collected at the
provincial level by the Turkish State Institute of
Statistics. The paper develops a parsimonious econometric
relation linking sector productivity to accessibility,
localization, and urbanization economies, proxying variables
in the tradition of the New Economic Geography literature.
The estimation results suggest that both localization and
urbanization economies, as well as market accessibility, are
productivity-enhancing factors in Turkey, although the
causation link between productivity and these agglomeration
measures is not clearly established. The sector-by-sector
estimation confirms this result, although the localization
economies effect is negative for the non-oil mineral sector,
and the urbanization economies effect is weak for
natural-resource-based sectors such as the wood and metal
industry. Although the data cover the period up to 2000 and
thus ignore the financial crisis that hit Turkey in 2001,
the current structural transformation of the country away
from the agricultural sector gives room to use the insights
of these results as a preliminary step to understand the new
challenges faced by the Turkish manufacturing sector. The
results provide a discussion base to revisit the policy
agenda on the improvement of the accessibility to markets,
the improvement of the business environment to ease the
creation and development of new firms, and a well-managed
urbanization process to tap in the economic potential of cities. |
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